Increasingly, the physical location and management of physical and logical (software) assets for an enterprise are being outsourced to what is referred to in the industry as cloud environments. The ability to outsource the management and support of both physical and logical assets has a tremendous upside to enterprises.
For example, an enterprise's main expertise may be in retail goods sold to consumers. Such an enterprise, over time, builds a substantial in-house Information Technology (IT) group that encompasses skilled technicians and even highly educated developers. The reason for this is that nearly every aspect of today's enterprises includes technology. So, the example enterprise needs to maintain systems for a variety of enterprise assets including such things as Human Resources, Employees, and Customers (that access the enterprise via online stores or that has loyalty accounts, etc. with the enterprise).
This is but a small sample of what such an enterprise may need in terms of technology. Technology also becomes outdated and requires migration to newer systems and/or hardware. All of these activities distract the enterprise away from its core focus, which is retailing. However, some of these activities may actually improve its core business when it if customer-facing, such as customer-relationship management activities.
Within no time a retail enterprise starts to have an IT department and physical assets that dwarf the size and assets of other internal departments.
With cloud technology, the example enterprise can outsource much, but probably not all, of the IT department and the physical and logical assets.
One major drawback to an enterprise's willingness to migrate to a cloud environment is security. It seems nearly every day that some cloud or enterprise system is compromised and consumers are alerted. Security can be related to disclosure of confidential information, such as social security numbers, or can be related to access availability, such as when a virus takes down a cloud environment and makes services unavailable.